Month of Mary, Day 3: Augustine Irenaeus, Hippolytus

Posted by Dim Bulb on May 3, 2010

Gen 2:5 And every plant of the field before it sprung up in the earth, and every herb of the ground before it grew: for the Lord God had not rained upon the earth; and there was not a man to till the earth.
Gen 2:6 But a spring rose out of the earth, watering all the surface of the earth.
Gen 2:7 And the Lord God formed man of the slime of the earth: and breathed into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul.
Gen 2:8 And the Lord God had planted a paradise of pleasure from the beginning: wherein he placed man whom he had formed.
Gen 2:9 And the Lord God brought forth of the ground all manner of trees, fair to behold, and pleasant to eat of: the tree of life also in the midst of paradise: and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

Augustine: The Son of God, say the Apostle, was made of the seed of David according to the flesh (Rom 1:3): that is, as though the mould of earth when their was no man to till the earth. For no man wrought in the Virgin of whom Christ was born. But a spring rose out of the earth, watering all the face of the earth. The face of the earth: that is, the dignity of the earth, whereby is most rightly understood the Mother of the Lord, the Virgin Mary, whom the Holy Spirit watered. For He is signified under the name of a spring and of water in the Gospel: as though Christ, made of such mould, was to be the Man set in paradise to work and keep it, that is to say, to perfect and keep it by the will of His Father De Genesi, Lib. ii.

St Irenaeus: As Adam, the first man made, had his substance from rude and still virgin earth–for God had not as yet rained upon the earth, and no man had worked it–and was fashioned by the hand of God, that is, by the Word of God; so likewise the same Word–who has His existence [according to His human nature] from Mary ever a Virgin–when recapitulating Adam in Himself, rightly received, by way of recapitulation, Adam’s mode of generation…But why then did He not take again the slime of the earth, instead of causing the formation to be from Mary? This was, that whilst the new formation to be made was not to be different from the first formation which should be saved, but the same was to be recapitulated, yet that it still should be a way of similitude. Adv Haer. L. iii. cap. xxi. 10.

St Hippolytus: He who delivered lost man, who as formed of earth, and bound with the chains of death, from the lowest hell, the same was man’s helper, Himself like to him–the First-begotten Word visiting in the virgin our first parent Adam; the Spiritual, in the womb, seeking the earthly; the Ever-living, him by disobedience dead; the Celestial calling the terrestrial to things higher; the Nobel wishing to grant liberty to the slave by His own obedience. Ex Serm. in Magn. Canticum, ap. Theodoritum, Dial. ii.